Thomas Walker Hobart Inskip, 1st Viscount Caldecote, CBE, PC, KC (5 March 1876 – 11 October 1947) was a British politician who served in many legal posts, culminating in serving as Lord Chancellor from 1939 until 1940. Despite legal posts dominating his career for all but four years, he is most prominently remembered for serving as Minister for Coordination of Defence from 1936 until 1939.
Thursday, June 20, 2019
Isaacs, Stella - Marchioness of Reading, Lady Reading
As Lady Reading, she was highly active in promoting Anglo-American relations, not only as the wife of a former British Ambassador to the US, but also in her peacetime role helping to rebuild the British economy and find stimulating employment for women – both voluntary and paid. In addition to the WVS, she also established Women's Home Industries, a highly successful exponent of British craft and cultural traditions in clothing and textiles, and also a prolific exporter to the United States and Canada.
After the December '35 death of her husband, Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading, Stella Isaacs was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1941, promoted to Dame Grand Cross (GBE) in 1944, and then in 1958 made a life peeress as Baroness Swanborough, of Swanborough in the County of Sussex.
She served on boards of various cultural bodies, including the BBC Advisory Board and Glyndebourne (opera house), and was a keen early supporter of University of Sussex. In 1958, she became the first woman to take a seat in the House of Lords in her own right. A 1963 profile in The Observer said: "the W.V.S. has brought out in her the latent political talent and the strength of character that once induced someone to say of her that had she been a man she would have become Prime Minister".
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
JFD - John Foster Dulles
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When Dwight D. Eisenhower became U.S. President in January 1953, Dulles was appointed and confirmed as his Secretary of State. As Secretary of State, Dulles still carried out the "containment" policy of neutralizing the Taiwan Strait during the Korean War, which had been established by President Truman in the Treaty of Peace with Japan of 1951. Dulles also supervised the completion of the Japanese Peace Treaty, in which full independence was restored to Japan under United States terms.
As Secretary of State, Dulles concentrated on building up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and forming other alliances (a phenomenon described as his "Pactomania") as part of his strategy of controlling Soviet expansion by threatening massive retaliation in the event of a war. In the 1950s, he worked alongside people in Vietnam, and others, to reduce French influence in Vietnam as well as asking the United States to attempt to cooperate with the French in the aid of strengthening Diem's Army. Over time Dulles concluded that it was time to "ease France out of Vietnam". In 1950 he also helped initiate the ANZUS Treaty for mutual protection with Australia and New Zealand.
Dulles strongly opposed communism, believing it was "Godless terrorism". One of his first major policy shifts towards a more aggressive position against communism occurred in March 1953, when Dulles supported Eisenhower's decision to direct the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), then headed by his brother Allen Dulles, to draft plans to overthrow the Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran. This led directly to the coup d'état via Operation Ajax in support of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who became the Shah of Iran.
In 1954 during at the height of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, Dulles hoped that American forces could attempt to help the beleaguered French army. Operation Vulture was planned; an aerial assault on the opposing communist Viet Minh siege positions. Eisenhower made American participation reliant on British support, but Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden was opposed and Vulture was reluctantly cancelled. With Dien Bien Phu's fall to the communists, Dulles fell out with Eden. At the 1954 Geneva Conference which concerned the breakup of French Indochina he forbade any contact with the Chinese delegation, refusing to shake hands with Zhou Enlai, the lead Chinese negotiator. He subsequently left leaving the US to avoid direct association with the negotiations.
Later during 1954 Dulles became the architect of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The treaty, signed by representatives of Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and the United States, provided for collective action against aggression.
The same year Dulles participated in the instigation of a military coup by the Guatemalan army through the CIA, claiming that the democratically-elected President Jacobo Árbenz's government and the Guatemalan Revolution were veering toward communism. Dulles had previously represented the United Fruit Company as a lawyer, while his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, was on the company's board of directors. Thomas Dudley Cabot, former CEO of United Fruit, held positions of director of International Security Affairs in the State Department. John Moore Cabot, a brother of Thomas Dudley Cabot, was secretary of Inter-American Affairs during much of the coup planning in 1953 and 1954.
Dulles was named Time's Man of the Year for 1954.
Dulles was one of the pioneers of massive retaliation and brinkmanship. In an article written for Life magazine, Dulles defined his policy of brinkmanship: "The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art." Dulles' hard line alienated many leaders of nonaligned countries when on June 9, 1955, he argued in a speech that "neutrality has increasingly become obsolete and, except under very exceptional circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception." Throughout the 1950s Dulles was in frequent conflict with those non-aligned statesmen he deemed excessively sympathetic to Communism, including India's V.K. Krishna Menon.
In November 1956, Dulles strongly opposed the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal zone in response to the Suez Crisis. During the most crucial days he was hospitalized after surgery and did not participate in Washington's decision-making. However, by 1958 Dulles had become an outspoken opponent of President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and prevented him from receiving arms from the United States. This policy allowed the Soviet Union to gain influence in Egypt, as it forced Nasser to turn to the Soviets for weapons.
Dulles served as the Chairman and Co-founder of the Commission on a Just and Durable Peace of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (later the National Council of Churches), the Chairman of the Board for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a Trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935 to 1952. Dulles was also a founding member of Foreign Policy Association and Council of Foreign Relations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles .
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Keynes, Geoffrey - St Bart's
Sir Geoffrey Langdon Keynes (25 March 1887, – 5 July 1982) was an English surgeon and author. He began his career as a medic in World War I, before becoming a doctor at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he made notable innovations in the fields of blood transfusion and breast cancer surgery. Keynes was also a publishing scholar and bibliographer of English literature and English medical history, focussing primarily on William Blake and William Harvey.
Geoffrey Keynes delayed his medical education in order to serve in World War I, where he served as a Lieutenant in the Royal Army Medical Corps and then worked as a consultant surgeon, becoming an expert in blood transfusion. His experience in the First World War led him to publish Blood Transfusion, the first book on the subject written by a British author. Keynes also founded the London Blood Transfusion Service with P. L. Oliver. Keynes was deeply affected by the brutality and gore that he witnessed in the field, which may have influenced his dislike for radical surgery later in his career.
After returning from World War 1, Keynes began working full-time at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London, where he worked under George Gask and Sir Thomas Dunhill. Keynes used his influence as an assistant surgeon to advocate for limited surgery instead of the invasive radical mastectomy. Frustrated with the mortality rate and gruesomeness of the radical mastectomy, Keynes experimented by inserting fifty milligrams of radium in a patient's tumor. He later observed that, "The ulcer rapidly healed ... and the whole mass became smaller, softer and less fixed."
Keynes pursued his new idea through a number of trials, observing the effectiveness of injecting radium chloride into breast cancer tumors compared with the effectiveness of the radical mastectomy. The promising results of these trials led Keynes to be cautiously optimistic, writing in 1927 that the "extension of [an] operation beyond a local removal might sometimes be unnecessary." Keynes' outlook was considered a radical break from the medical consensus at the time. Keynes wrote in his autobiography that his work with radium "was regarded with some interest by American surgeons," but that the concept of a limited mastectomy failed to gain significant traction in the medical community at the time. His doubts regarding the radical mastectomy were vindicated some fifty years later, when innovators like Bernard Fisher and others revisited his data and pursued what became known as a lumpectomy. Limited surgeries, like the lumpectomy, accompanied by radiation are now the status quo in breast cancer treatment.
Keynes also a pioneer in the treatment of myasthenia gravis. Much like with breast cancer, the medical community knew very little about how to treat the disease at the time. Keynes pioneered the removal of the Thymus Gland, which is now the norm in treatment of myasthenia gravis.
Keynes pursued his new idea through a number of trials, observing the effectiveness of injecting radium chloride into breast cancer tumors compared with the effectiveness of the radical mastectomy. The promising results of these trials led Keynes to be cautiously optimistic, writing in 1927 that the "extension of [an] operation beyond a local removal might sometimes be unnecessary." Keynes' outlook was considered a radical break from the medical consensus at the time. Keynes wrote in his autobiography that his work with radium "was regarded with some interest by American surgeons," but that the concept of a limited mastectomy failed to gain significant traction in the medical community at the time. His doubts regarding the radical mastectomy were vindicated some fifty years later, when innovators like Bernard Fisher and others revisited his data and pursued what became known as a lumpectomy. Limited surgeries, like the lumpectomy, accompanied by radiation are now the status quo in breast cancer treatment.
Keynes also a pioneer in the treatment of myasthenia gravis. Much like with breast cancer, the medical community knew very little about how to treat the disease at the time. Keynes pioneered the removal of the Thymus Gland, which is now the norm in treatment of myasthenia gravis.
Keynes enlisted to be a consulting surgeon to the Royal Air Force at the outbreak of World War II. In 1944 he was promoted to the rank of acting air vice-marshal.
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sī vīs pācem, parā bellum
igitur quī dēsīderat pācem praeparet bellum therefore, he who desires peace, let him prepare for war sī vīs pācem, parā bellum if you wan...
