Portrait of an Appeaser: Robert Hadow, First Secretary in the British Foreign Office, 1931-1939

by Lindsay Michie

Overview

This book relates the policy of appeasement to the personal beliefs and decisions of those responsible for foreign policy. Using Robert Hadow, First Secretary in the Foreign Office, as an example of an appeaser, this approach demonstrates how intelligent and capable men in Britain fell victim to a policy which, to many still, in retrospect, appears blind and irrational. An examination of Hadow's fear of war, his reaction to communism, his sympathy for the German minority in Czechoslovakia, and his actions inside and outside the Foreign Office in pursuit of appeasement is made in this book through detailed research of Hadow's public and private papers. By following the course of Hadow's career and the workings of his mind in the 1930s, this study explains the thinking behind a policy associated with Britain on the eve of World War II.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275953690
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	09/13/1996
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

LINDSAY W. MICHIE teaches at East Carolina University, Chowan College, and Roanoke-Chowan Community College.

Table of Contents

Preface
Unlikely Diplomat
Austria: Appeasement Defined
Czechoslovakia: Appeasement Applied
The Foreign Office: Appeasement Pursued
London: Mood of Desperation
Appeasement
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Michie narrates the diplomatic career of her grandfather, who though a fairly minor figure in the British government during the 1930s contributed to the assumptions and values that underlay the appeasement policy toward Nazi Germany. Seeing him as a representative example of his generation, she traces his wartime experience and his diplomatic work in East Central Europe to explain his desire to avoid war, and notes the fear of Communism that pervaded the upper classes of British society. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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