The Summit by Ed Conway

Author:Ed Conway
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

As George Bolton had observed, by the first Thursday the conference was already descending into ‘complete confusion’. You could hardly walk through the hotel lobby without bumping into one or another disaffected delegate desperate to vent their frustration. Occasionally the gripe was about an obscure matter like exchange controls or rules on looted artwork, but more often it was about those confounded quotas.

In a rare effort to escape the madhouse, that evening Redvers Opie, the Treasury man in Washington, took some of the British delegation, including Keynes and Robbins, for a ride in his car around the hotel grounds. To the east was the ever-present summit of Mount Washington, ‘looming up over this upland basin’.69 They rode ‘among peaks, dales, streams and mountains with beautiful tints beyond,’ wrote Lydia. ‘And a feeling of grandeur &rest spreads in one’s bosom.’70

But it was hard to enjoy the scenery, so all-consuming was the conference. The long days, the sleepless nights and the threat that two years of preparation would be for nothing … it was all taking its toll. Keynes was suffering more than anyone else. Hard as everyone had tried to take the load off him (Lydia, in particular, had rationed his time and attempted to maintain silence in their rooms), he was difficult to control: ‘it is intolerable for him to go slow’, wrote Robbins. Everyone knew how fragile the great man’s health had been, he added. ‘Keynes is showing obvious signs of exhaustion and we are all very worried about him.’71 It was an early portent of the collapse that would happen in little over a week’s time.

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* The play, latterly renamed And Then There Were None, launched in the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway on 27 June 1944. It would run for just over a year.

† Skidelsky tells of how, on holiday in Algiers in the 1920s, Keynes ‘apparently refused to increase a tip he had given to a shoe-shine boy, remarking “I will not be party to debasing the currency.”’ Robert Skidelsky, The Life of John Maynard Keynes, London, 2000, p. 304.

‡ Mr Noriega Morales had other reasons to be preoccupied: the Guatemalan dictator Jorge Ubico, had just resigned in the face of mass strikes across the country. His brother, also an economist, phoned him with the news on the first day of Bretton Woods.

§ Shroff, then a director of the Tata Group, now one of the world’s industrial giants, would make his name as one of the authors of the Bombay Plan – a set of proposals on how to develop the post-independence Indian economy.

¶ The woman named in the rumour was Dorothy Richardson, who was also present at the conference. Although her part in the construction of the quotas remains unclear, it transpired that her husband, British-born Treasury employee Solomon Adler, was accused of espionage several years later. Bank of England Archives, OV38/9.

# France’s was to be $450 million, compared with China’s *550 million and Britain’s $1300 million.

** Leroy Stinebower, a secretary in the American delegation, would

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