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By Root 1014 0

to his subordinates. When he forgot the name of a favorite thriller writer, he was mildly distressed. “That’s always the way,” he said sadly, “so ungrateful; so ungrateful.” Languid, dressed with casual elegance, with a smile, said one, “like moonlight on a tombstone,” he rarely seemed to take himself or anything else seriously. He was a great parliamentary speaker, but he made light of it. “I say what occurs to me,” he told Churchill, “and sit down at the end of the first grammatical sentence.” He told a lunch party that, alas, he had a strange mental quirk when it came to decisions: “I can remember every argument, repeat all the pros and cons, and even make quite a good speech on the subject. But the conclusion, the decision, is a perfect blank in my mind.” His defenders called this a pose, just as his habit of staying in bed all morning was his way of working hard. Others were not so sure. “If you wanted nothing done,” said Churchill, “A.J.B. was undoubtedly the best man for the task.” Lloyd George was once asked what he thought Balfour’s place in history would be. His answer: “He will be just like the scent on a pocket handkerchief.”7

From his father Balfour inherited a fortune that made him one of the richest men in Britain; from his mother, a deeply religious woman, the Cecil family tradition of public service and Conservative politics. Like Curzon, who succeeded him in the Foreign Office, he was part of that cosy, aristocratic world where everyone was somehow connected to everyone else. He once nearly got engaged, but the girl he had chosen died of typhoid fever. He never married, and one of his devoted sisters kept house for him. He was attached to his family and friends, but he did not really need them. As he wrote to one, “You are as necessary as you ever were— but how necessary is that? How necessary are any of us to any of us?” 8

He was clever, fascinated by ideas, and with a great ability to grasp the essence of an argument. He was also curiously, even alarmingly, detached. At the height of German submarine warfare, which threatened to strangle Britain economically, his only response to the daily list of sinkings was “It is very tiresome. These Germans are intolerable.” In cabinet meetings, Lloyd George said, Balfour would present a case persuasively and then, after a pause, the other side with equal eloquence, ending with a sigh: “But if you ask me what course I think we ought to take then I must say I feel perplexed.” Curzon, who knew him well, came to regard him as an evil and dangerous man:

His charm of manner, his extraordinary intellectual distinction, his seeming indifference to petty matters, his power of dialectic, his long and honourable career of public service, blinded all but those who knew him from the inside to the lamentable ignorance, indifference and levity of his regime. He never studied his papers, he never knew the facts, at the Cabinet he had seldom read the morning’s Foreign Office telegrams, and he never looked ahead. He trusted to his unequalled powers of improvisation to take him through any trouble and enable him to leap lightly from one crisis to another.9

It is strange, therefore, that Balfour not only made a commitment to Zionism but that he persisted with it. One of his subordinates thought that he had never really cared about anything else. Was it his early religious upbringing that left him, as it did Lloyd George, with an intimate knowledge of Jewish history? His fascination with the intellectual abilities of Jews? He told Nicolson that Jews were “the most gifted race that mankind has seen since the Greeks of the fifth century.” Did he see in Zionism, as he once said, “guardians of a continuity of religious and racial tradition that made the unassimilated Jew a great conservative force in world politics”? In a conversation with House, Balfour remarked that “someone told him, and he was inclined to believe it, that nearly all Bolshevism and disturbances of a like nature, are directly traceable to the Jews of the world. They seem determined either to have what they want or