Saturday, March 11, 2006
Christine Keeler who destroyed John Profumo’s career
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROFUMO SCANDAL
German power was a foundation of Cold War thinking throughout
During the 1995 to 1996 period I was working in the control room of one of London’s major black taxi radio circuits and from time to time I received calls for taxis from none other than John Profumo, the star of the 1963 scandal which rocked the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent, the world. He was one of our good account holders.
It was with some sadness that I learnt this morning on the radio that he has passed on at the age of 91. I had been a mere schoolboy in 1963 and his misadventure with call girls was somewhat above my understanding at the time but his downfall affected me. When I use the word “downfall” please do not read too much into that word; people who are poor do not use black taxis regularly as account holders. John Profumo died rich.
Well, the world has gone on from changes to changes, as always, and it is not easy to recreate the atmosphere of the Cold War during the early sixties. Those were fraught times when the Warsaw Pact faced the Western powers in the aftermath of the dissolution of the great imperial empires across the globe which had distinguished the previous two centuries. Before the mid-twentieth century it was axiomatic that the rule of the “white man” was the law of the world and that it was the duty of lesser Mankind to obey that law. V.I.Lenin changed that and for a time all Europe and North America and the rest of European Mankind trembled.
What would have happened if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War? That might have been the outcome if Communist China had stayed with the Russians and the Third World had joined up too. The Communists had a great deal to offer the brown and the black man. They held up the tantalising prize of equality with the Europeans. The former Soviet Union lost and one can only assume that by and by the Third World (still so called despite the disappearance of the socialist Second World) will have to relearn the disciplines of obedience to the governing groups of Mankind who are predominantly European and Japanese.
I am digressing. The subject is the Profumo scandal and its significance. For those who were not alive or were too young here are the bare facts:
John Profumo died peacefully late on Thursday night, surrounded by his family at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. He had been admitted two days earlier.
It was with some sadness that I learnt this morning on the radio that he has passed on at the age of 91. I had been a mere schoolboy in 1963 and his misadventure with call girls was somewhat above my understanding at the time but his downfall affected me. When I use the word “downfall” please do not read too much into that word; people who are poor do not use black taxis regularly as account holders. John Profumo died rich.
Well, the world has gone on from changes to changes, as always, and it is not easy to recreate the atmosphere of the Cold War during the early sixties. Those were fraught times when the Warsaw Pact faced the Western powers in the aftermath of the dissolution of the great imperial empires across the globe which had distinguished the previous two centuries. Before the mid-twentieth century it was axiomatic that the rule of the “white man” was the law of the world and that it was the duty of lesser Mankind to obey that law. V.I.Lenin changed that and for a time all Europe and North America and the rest of European Mankind trembled.
What would have happened if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War? That might have been the outcome if Communist China had stayed with the Russians and the Third World had joined up too. The Communists had a great deal to offer the brown and the black man. They held up the tantalising prize of equality with the Europeans. The former Soviet Union lost and one can only assume that by and by the Third World (still so called despite the disappearance of the socialist Second World) will have to relearn the disciplines of obedience to the governing groups of Mankind who are predominantly European and Japanese.
I am digressing. The subject is the Profumo scandal and its significance. For those who were not alive or were too young here are the bare facts:
John Profumo died peacefully late on Thursday night, surrounded by his family at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. He had been admitted two days earlier.
Mr Profumo was secretary of state for war when he was involved with Christine Keeler in 1963. At the same time, she was seeing a Soviet naval military attaché.
Mr Profumo at first denied the affair, but after publication of a letter he had written her, he resigned on June 5, 1963.
Although there proved to be no breach of national security, the scandal rattled the government to its foundations, made celebrities of the call girls Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, and titillated newspaper readers.
It ended Mr Profumo's political career when he was only 48.
Far more damaging than a tasteless association with Christine Keeler and their encounters at the apartment of the osteopath Stephen Ward was the fact that she was sharing her favours with the Soviet agent Yevgeny Ivanov.
In an official report on the affair, the Court of Appeal judge (and later law lord) Lord Denning concluded that national security had not been breached.
He said Mr Ivanov and Mr Profumo "did no doubt narrowly miss one another on occasions; and this afforded Stephen Ward and Christine Keeler much amusement."
Mr Ivanov had told Mr Ward in 1961 that the Soviet Union knew that the USA was about to supply atomic weapons to West Germany and he asked Mr Ward to find out through his friends when that decision was to be implemented, Lord Denning said.
But Lord Denning said he believed Mr Ward's denials that Christine Keeler had been asked to get this information from Mr Profumo.
"Mr. Profumo was also clear that she never asked him, and I am quite sure that he would not have told her if she had asked him," Lord Denning concluded.
The scandal was a severe blow to the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Mr Macmillan resigned in November 1963 for “health reasons”, and his Conservative Party went on to lose the 1964 general election.
There was a sensational trial. Mr Ward was convicted of living on the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. He took a drug overdose during the trial and died after the verdicts were announced.
Christine Keeler was convicted of perjury for her testimony against Aloysius "Lucky" Gordon, a Jamaican who was accused of causing "grievous bodily harm" to her in an incident that originally drew attention to the Profumo affair. The Court of Appeal afterwards reversed Mr Gordon’s conviction.
Mr Profumo retreated from public life and looked for something else to do. His wife, the actress Valerie Hobson stood by him throughout the scandal. She died in 1998.
Mr Profumo was a wealthy man, the Harrow- and Oxford-educated son of a well-known lawyer descended from an Italian aristocrat who had settled in England in 1880 and owned a large stake in the Provident Life Association. A Swiss takeover of the firm in 1981 yielded Mr Profumo more than £6,000,000 (then worth nearly US$12 million).
He had served in North Africa during the second world war, received a U.S. Bronze Star and was made a military OBE for his service. He was elected to Parliament in 1940.
About a year after his disgrace, Mr Profumo found work as an unpaid helper at Toynbee Hall, a charity for the poor in London's East End. He began as a dishwasher, worked in a social club for alcoholics, became a fundraiser for the charity, then its chairman, and eventually its president.
In the decades after his fall, Mr Profumo said in an interview in November 2003 that he had learned "humility."
"And," he added, "I've learned not to bother too much about what seems a bother, and doesn't really matter very much."
In 1975, the Queen made Mr Profumo a CBE for his charity work.
A friend, the late Bishop Jim Thompson, said in 1993 that Mr Profumo "says he has never known a day since it happened when he has not felt shame."
The key to the significance of the scandal is, I submit, Germany. The background is as follows:
The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 had led to American calls for the rearmament of West Germany in order to defend western Europe from the perceived Soviet threat. But the memory of recent German aggression had led other European states to seek tight control over the West German military setup. Germany's partners in the Coal and Steel Community had decided to establish an European Defence Community (EDC), with an integrated army, navy and air force, composed of the armed forces of its member states. The West German military would be subject to complete EDC control, but the other EDC member states (Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) would cooperate in the EDC while maintaining independent control of their own armed forces.
Though the EDC treaty was signed in May 1952, it never entered into force. France's Gaullists rejected it on the grounds that it threatened national sovereignty, and when the French National Assembly refused to ratify it in August 1954, the treaty died. The French had killed their own proposal. Other means then had to be found to allow West German rearmament. In response, the Brussels Treaty was modified to include West Germany, and to form the Western European Union (WEU). West Germany was to be permitted to rearm, and have full sovereign control of its military; the WEU would however regulate the size of the armed forces permitted to each of its member states. Fears of a return to Nazism, however, soon receded, and as a consequence these provisions of the WEU treaty have little effect today.
Although the Vietnam War was just beginning and the Korean War was a recent memory the chief battleground between the Communists and the Western powers was Germany. The notorious Check Point Charlie between West Berlin and East Berlin was the salient symbol. V.I.Lenin had once said: “without Germany we are lost” and he was right. His successors in office probably thought the same way and if so they would have been right too. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall preceded and heralded the fall of the Soviet Union.
Germany was also the heart of the Profumo scandal. As secretary of state for war, John Profumo would have been mightily involved in the complexities of German military preparedness and compromised his position therein by associating with someone with a connection on the other side of the Cold War. He paid with his career.
THE END
This article was published in the Bangla Mirror newspaper, the first English language weekly for the Bangladeshis of the United Kingdom - read from New Zealand to Iceland
# posted by Ali @ 12:08 PM 
