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Thomas Stone’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty

Thomas Stone’s role in the North Atlantic Treaty

Stone -> Howell

 
Thomas Archibald Stone
 

In June of 2006 I received an interesting email from Michael Manulak, a student at the University of Toronto. Mr. Manulak said he saw this web site and was developing a detailed research paper on the negotiation of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1948-1949, in which our Thomas Archibald Stone “played an integral role in Washington from July- September 1948.” Mr. Manulak asked if I would put him in contact with family members who knew Mr. Stone which I was happy to do.

In December he forwarded a copy of his completed paper titled The Gentle Nudge: The Canadian Department of External Affairs and the North Atlantic Treaty, 1948-1949, with the following note:

You will note that there are several references to Thomas Stone throughout the paper describing his role within the context of the negotiations. You will also note that there is a small section describing him personally on pgs. 11-12. For this I relied extensively on your (Mr. Spencer Howell & Ellen Devine’s interviews) as well as some additional research. Although brief, I do believe it is the most extensive research on him to date. I am very grateful for your help with this.

I encourage you to read the entire paper (download a copy here), but here are two excerpts – the first from p.9:

The most active Canadians at the NAT talks were: Lester B. Pearson, Hume Wrong, Thomas A. Stone and Escott Reid.

Then from p.11

Thomas A. Stone, the Canadian Minister in Washington, served more extensively than any Canadian during the NAT negotiations. Having grown up in Chatham, ON, Stone was a close personal friend of Pearson’s from their childhood. In terms of his personality, Henderson describes Stone as having a “great good nature” and being “particularly benign”. Stone’s opinions were essentially internationalist, however, with a greater hint of pragmatism than Reid or Pearson. In Washington, Stone was particularly well-connected having started his career there as a Third Secretary in 1927. In the embassy in Washington, Stone was seen as indispensable to the point that Wrong sought to delay Stone’s departure from Washington in the summer of 1949 (for an Ambassadorship in Sweden). Stone, a great entertainer, played musically and, according to Pearson his parties were “famous on two continents”. These parties were a known forum for high level diplomacy. Stone maintained close personal relations with Acheson, Hickerson and Theodore Achilles and “very often saw them socially”. He had an especially close personal friendship with Achilles and, as a result, one can observe that nearly all conversations with Achilles are made through Stone.

Thanks to Mr. Manulak’s paper we now have a better understanding of Thomas Stone’s significant role in developing the agreement which forms the basis for the existence of NATO today.

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Emily Campbell Price Manuscript

Campbell -> Stone

I’ve just finished re-reading Emily Campbell Price’s “The Campbells from Auchindrain”. She traces hundreds of descendants of Peter Campbell and Isabel Ferguson’s family starting in mid 1700’s Argyll, Scotland, (near Inverary) to the US and Canada in 1970. She peppers her 71 page manuscript, which she calls “a long letter to the family”, with comments you won’t easily forget. And she educates us on the finer points of Scottish genealogy with paragraphs like “The Name Rule”:

In Scotland they followed what might be termed a name rule in the naming of children. The eldest son was usually named for his father’s father; the second son for his mother’s father; the eldest daughter for her mother’s mother; the second daughter for her father’s mother. If this rule had been hard and fast it would have made things easy, but there were variations…(continues for another half of a page!)

And then she admonishes us with points like:

“Surely some descendant of Peter Campbell and Nancy McArthur can do some investigating…after all…these people were pioneers, and pioneers made our country far more than politicians did. Pioneers should be remembered but how are they to be remembered if we don’t know who their descendants are?”

I obtained a copy of the manuscript by making several trips to the Ft. Myers and Naples LDS church libraries and photocopying the microfiche (special ordered from Salt Lake City!). So that you don’t have to go through that, I scanned the photocopied pages into PDF format which are now posted in the “Histories” section of the Family Tree database. The names in the manuscript are now also merged into the Family Tree.