John Freeman (journalist)

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John Freeman PC MBE (* 19th February 1915 in London , † 20th December 2014 ) was a British politician of the Labor Party , diplomat , officer and journalist long, ten years the constituency Watford as a deputy in the House of Commons represented several times Junior Minister , Ambassador to the USA and High Commissioner to India . Great fame he achieved as a moderator and was used for the interviews in his BBC telecast Face to Face celebrated in the 1960s.

Life

Studies and World War II

Freeman, son of the well-known and eccentric barrister Horace Freeman, completed a degree in Classical Studies at Brasenose College at the University of Oxford after attending Westminster School and published the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell at the time .

He then worked as a copywriter and joined the Coldstream Guards as a soldier during World War II in 1940 and moved to the Rifle Brigade as a lieutenant in 1941 . In the following years he participated as a member of the 7th Armored Division , known as "desert rats" ( 'Desert Rats') , on the first and second battle of El Alamein in 1942, the Operation Avalanche in September 1943 and the Operation Overlord in June 1944 in part and was last stationed in Hamburg . For his services he was a member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1943 and was finally promoted to major .

Member of the House of Commons and Junior Minister

After the war, Freeman, a staunch was socialist in the lower house elections on July 5, 1945 elected as a candidate of the Labor Party for the first time for the Members of the House of Commons, where he managed the acting deputy of the constituency Watford , William Helmore from the Conservative Party to beat. The new Prime Minister Clement Attlee elected the young MP to deliver the address of loyalty after the opening speech (Gracious Speech) by King George VI. During the speech he wore his Majors Uniform of the Desert Rats and moved the previous Prime Minister Winston Churchill to tears, who then congratulated him in the smoking room of the Parliament building.

Shortly thereafter, Freeman first Parliamentary private secretary to a minister and then 1946 Financial Secretary of the War Department (Financial Secretary to the War Office ) , before 1947 Undersecretary of State or Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Supply (Ministry of Supply) was. As such, he was in charge of the legislative process to nationalize the UK steel industry . His accompanying speech led to the turning point in the second reading of this highly contested legislative proposal and earned it recognition from the conservative opposition .

On April 23, 1951, Freeman, along with Secretary of Labor Aneurin Bevan and Secretary of Commerce Harold Wilson, resigned from his government office because of Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell 's cuts in the NHS ( National Health Service ) . While Bevan and Wilson criticized the cuts in aids such as glasses and dentures, Freeman directed his main criticism towards the arming of the British Army over the Korean War , which influenced Gaitskell's draft budget.

In the internal struggle after the Labor Party's defeat in the October 25, 1951 elections , Freeman was both the intellectual driving force and the organizer of the forty or so dissenting MPs. Bevan said of him at that time: “He is the only one of us who is really dangerous” ('He is the only one of us who is really dangerous'). However, four years later he decided not to run again in the elections on May 26, 1955 , and resigned from the House of Commons after ten years of membership.

Editor-in-chief of the weekly New Statesman and presenter of the BBC program Face to Face

After leaving the House of Commons, Freeman began his journalistic career in 1955 as deputy editor-in-chief of the left-wing political weekly New Statesman , before he became editor-in-chief of this weekly newspaper in 1960 as the successor to Kingsley Martin . In doing so, he prevailed against his party friend Richard Crossman , who, however, was still to take on this role in 1970. Although his articles were sometimes grandiose, as the pseudonym Flavus for his column showed, he was a good organizer who brought order into the journal's editorial affairs. Although numerous socialists criticized Freeman for bringing the New Statesman closer to the right wing of the Labor Party, the weekly newspaper's circulation rose to a record 90,000 copies during his work as publisher and editor-in-chief until 1965. He was succeeded as editor-in-chief in 1965 by Paul Johnson .

In addition to working for the New Statesman , he achieved great fame as the presenter of the BBC program Face to Face and was celebrated for the interviews there in the 1960s. In it he created a new and still unique interview style in which he always - except for the interview with the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung - sat with his back to the camera, hidden from the viewer, his eyes focused on his interlocutor and the truth with one probing flat, emotionless voice. He spoke to personalities such as Bertrand Russell , Edith Sitwell , Cecil Beaton , Evelyn Waugh , John Reith, 1st Baron Reith , Henry Moore , Augustus John , Martin Luther King , John Huston , John Osborne , Adam Faith and Tony Hancock . Even when repeated decades later, the interviews received great attention due to Freeman's keen intellect and careful research into the various people from politics and television.

High Commissioner in India and Ambassador to the USA

To his surprise, in 1965, Prime Minister Harold Wilson asked Freeman to succeed Paul Gore-Booth as High Commissioner in India. This request was influenced in part by the idea that the previous editor-in-chief of the New Statesman could develop a good relationship with the generation of Indian intellectuals who had received part of their education in Britain. However, immediately after his arrival in India, he had to deal with the practical realities of the subcontinent, as Wilson had previously angered the Indian government after it appeared to sympathize with Pakistan in the conflict between these two countries, which led to demands in the Indian parliament , to withdraw from the Commonwealth of Nations . His calm diplomacy helped ease this conflict between India and Britain. In 1966 he was also appointed a member of the Privy Council and held the office of High Commissioner in India until he was replaced by Morrice James in 1968.

He then received his accreditation as ambassador to the USA in 1969 , where he succeeded Patrick Dean . He was posted to Washington, DC against the background that the British Labor government had expected a victory for the Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey in the US presidential election in 1968 . In fact, Republican Richard Nixon won , whom Freeman attacked in an article in the New Statesman during the 1964 presidential election as "a discredited and old-fashioned seller of the irrational and ineffective" and whose defeat was "a victory for decency." Ultimately, this led to the hitherto cordial US-American-British relationship cooling. However, Freeman used a good relationship with Henry Kissinger , the national security adviser of President Nixon.

After the Conservative Party won the general election on June 18, 1970 , Freeman was asked by Secretary of State Alec Douglas-Home to remain as ambassador to the United States, but he refused. He was succeeded in 1971 by Rowland Baring, 3rd Earl of Cromer , the former Governor of the Bank of England .

TV director, university professor and private life

Instead, Freeman became chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of London Weekend Television LWT in 1971 , a television station that was in serious financial trouble at the time. During his work there, which lasted until 1984, he succeeded in rebuilding the transmitter. During that time he was also Chairman of the Board of Directors of Independent Television's (ITV) News Division, Governor of the British Film Institute and Vice President of the Royal Television Society .

He then was visiting professor for international relations at the University of California, Davis from 1985 to 1990 .

Freeman has been married four times and has six children. His marriage to Elizabeth Johnson in 1938 was dissolved in 1948. Shortly thereafter, in 1948, he married Margaret Kerr, who died in 1957. His third marriage was in 1962 with Catherine Dove, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. In the meantime, he had a love affair with the Irish writer Edna O'Brien , who wrote the short story The Love Object about it in 1968 . In it, the woman is furious about the man's habit of folding his pants so precisely before he goes to bed with her. Catherine Dove previously worked for Thames Television and was married to longtime BBC Washington correspondent Charles Wheeler. He was still on this post while Freeman was Ambassador to the United States. After Freeman and Catherine Dove were divorced in 1976, he last married Judith Mitchell, who was secretary to the couple during the ambassadors' time in the United States. From this marriage two daughters were born.

literature

  • Hugh Purcell: A Very Private Celebrity: The Nine Lives of John Freeman . London: Robson Press, 2015 (not used here)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nick Thomas-Symonds : I wish everybody would forget I was alive . Review, in: Financial Times , July 5, 2015, p. 9
personal data
SURNAME Freeman, John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician, member of the House of Commons, officer, journalist and diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH February 19, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH 20th December 2014